The fragile and the wildhttps://fragileandwild.com
Ethics, ecology and other enticements for a stalled writerThu, 14 Dec 2017 00:11:38 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngThe fragile and the wildhttps://fragileandwild.com
Slow death and the felling of treeshttps://fragileandwild.com/2013/04/11/slow-death-and-the-felling-of-trees/
https://fragileandwild.com/2013/04/11/slow-death-and-the-felling-of-trees/#commentsThu, 11 Apr 2013 20:09:44 +0000http://fragileandwild.com/?p=293]]>

A long and wiry man perches high above my head, chainsaw in hand. I know little about him, except that his name is Lee and he and his bride are homesteading half a mile down the road from my coastal home.

I know much more about the towering white spruce that Lee has come to wrangle. We made our acquaintance 35 years ago, when I first laid claim to the land that blankets its sprawling, shallow roots. Preceding my arrival by at least half a century, anchored on bedrock and holding fast against the prevailing northwest, this tree has held prominent place in life lived at this site.

This spruce has proudly shouldered the bald eagle, nourished the red squirrel and her brood, and shaded the tiny pond where a solitary green frog makes its quiet home. It has hosted the acrobatic genius of generations of raccoon, antagonists in the endless folly of my quest for a varmint-proof birdfeeder. And it has roosted entire flocks of American goldfinch, the tiny voracious creatures all but vanishing into its dark dense branches, their presence betrayed not by shimmering plumage, but by an exuberant spring chatter impossible to restrain. At such times I have beheld a tree quivering in strange and bright vibrato.

At other times I have beheld a tree convulsed in darker fury. With each advance of the season of wind and dread, the angles of this spruce have sharpened, the gap between bough and shingle narrowing to dangerous scale. Peering out from my bed at night, I have offered up my whispered urgings to endure the lashings of hurricane swell. I have held my breath against sharp and sudden horror, rued the day a small home was built mere footsteps from the leeward bark of a massive spruce.

I’m a fainthearted settler, slow to intervene in the perennial tussle with wildness around me. Countless summers passed before I could consent to mowing, and then only when an ever-patient grounds-keeper offered to circle round island patches of hawkweed and oxeye in bloom. Much longer still, did it take to firm the resolve that sent Lee and his saw up my tree.

Decision made, decision executed. When Lee returns to the ground, my great white spruce is reduced to one third of its mature height.

It is a crude intervention, the practice of topping. Crude and widely censured by reputable arborists. But given only two choices, fell swoop or sawed top, I chose the latter.

For an ancient tree in decline, it is a lethal ministration.

Death, however, will come slowly. In its prolonging, critics would accuse that I have robbed the tree of the dignity of its due, forcing it to hobble on in deformity toward a bitter end. Conventional wisdom would argue that once a tree’s presence is more menacing than majestic, it should be cleanly felled. By one account, my choice was cruel; by the other, foolish.

Have I permitted some sentimental fantasy to cloud my judgment as steward of this land? Does this tree now suffer a mortification far worse than sudden death because I was too much the coward to say farewell?

I cannot know for certain. But having borne the weight of these questions as the remaining boughs of this weary giant bore the snows of another winter, I hold to the conviction that to be dying is to live still. And for the living, tree and squirrel and settler alike, there are losses to be endured, sufferings to be negotiated.

The incumbencies of survival, it seems, aren’t always pretty. They take us to places inconceivable when we are at the height of our powers, expose us to violent acts by virtual strangers, weaken the will and humble the heart. As the surgeries accrue for my own body in decline, with each probe and cut and disappointment of aging flesh, I am closer to understanding the logic of fell-swoop surrender.

I understand, but cannot embrace. Surely in the great pageant of survival there is more than primal reflex, other forces at play. Perhaps behind the anguished gush of adrenaline or tree sap, lies the faint persistent pulse of service. Perhaps after all, we live not to gorge, but to serve. And in the elegant, ordered, cadence of the seasons, we serve from vigour and also from wane, learning that service is called forth from simple presence no less than from grand deed.

My white spruce is topped, and dying. It is diminished, but not abject. Dying, it still stands, its flourishing fully mature. In a few weeks, the finches will return, their vibrato will resume, and a noble tree will serve still.

Fact-checking readers may want to check out a few useful background sources here. And for a more extensive (and metaphor-free) argument against the fell-swoop approach to end-of-life, please refer to the affidavit posted in Supplementals, along with four opinion pieces published in 2014.

]]>https://fragileandwild.com/2013/04/11/slow-death-and-the-felling-of-trees/feed/9Man on SprucecfrazeeThis land is my land: Robert Latimer and the plundered landscapehttps://fragileandwild.com/2012/07/10/this-land-is-my-land-robert-latimer-and-the-plundered-landscape/
https://fragileandwild.com/2012/07/10/this-land-is-my-land-robert-latimer-and-the-plundered-landscape/#commentsTue, 10 Jul 2012 20:40:23 +0000http://fragileandwild.com/?p=246]]>A slow pan to a classic frame. A solitary man stands on high ground in evening light, surveying land, sky, and settlement. The soundtrack is subtle but arresting: distant wind, giving way to the soft but urgent tapping of a single atmospheric note, then a persistent throb of airy, fluttering strings. The narrator’s solemn voice begins:

“Robert Latimer. Canadian canola farmer. Father of three. And convicted of second-degree murder.…”

In a mere 14 seconds, with spare and careful strokes, the argument is made. It emerges, irresistibly, from an iconic portrait – a portrait shaded in Canadian idiom, invoking the stoic endurance of a northern people. Farming: the patient work of nature’s stewards. Fatherhood: the primal calling to selfless nurture and protection. Even Canola: the quintessential expression of a nation’s self-reliant, can-do ingenuity.

Only problem is, it’s all bunk. Sometimes a man standing on a bluff is just that — a man standing on a bluff.

For nearly 20 years since Robert Latimer asphyxiated his disabled daughter Tracy in 1993, people with deep understandings of disability have laboured to call that bluff. Yet our efforts in this regard are perpetually undercut by the powerful cultural memes that are so skillfully reproduced in this short segment of the faux-documentary, Taking Mercy.

A meme, according to Malcolm Gladwell, “is an idea that behaves like a virus – that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects”. Memes build and mutate from what is comfortable and familiar. Conjure up a man who works the soil with his hands, a man who stands erect against the wind, a man who holds his rightful place on the rugged plains of the western frontier. Say no more. We know this man, this farmer, this father, this Canadian.

But this man, in this frame, a killer? Now it is not just one man who stands sullied. Suddenly, the memes that sustain his ‘salt-of-the-earth’ persona are sorely threatened. The stakes are high. The wagons circle. Dip the killer in a redemptive wash of mercy and all is secure again in a small and tidy world. If Tracy’s death was merciful, then the crime of murder, like a mutating meme, becomes an honourable act that more comfortably settles on the shoulders of the noble figure in the landscape.

I’ve had many occasions to voice my outrage at Robert Latimer’s crime, and my horror at the wave of support that rose as his arrest and multiple trials turned through the cycles of front page news. Tracy is 19 years dead. Robert is again a free man, after 7 years in prison, and 2 ½ years on day parole.

I have no desire to rekindle the flame of this man’s still unrepentant posture that ending Tracy’s life was a blameless act. My quarrel here is not with a Saskatchewan farmer, or an Ontario mother, or any other horribly misguided parent seeking to end the life of a disabled child. My quarrel is with the clichés and platitudes that both foster and condone a very particular homicidal impulse. It is a preposterous notion that Tracy’s life did not conform to the law of nature that Robert somehow epitomizes. The simplistic morality of pitting the “law of nature” against the “law of a nation” – the core assertion of Global’s Taking Mercy– must be exposed for what it is: a fundamentally eugenic rhetoric.

Meme-makers and media moguls, take heed. Return with us to that escarpment. Dress us in Gore-Tex and Lycra, and frame us in the dusky rose glow of evening. Fill our lungs with clean, sharp air and thrill our senses with the chatter of small hungry creatures. Haul the gear that we live by – our wheelchairs, ventilators, feeding pumps – on the same rail that carries the HD gear to capture your beauty shot. Imagine us – find us – alive and fully in our element, and witness the unfolding of a new narrative. Poised on this mighty landscape, all crumpled and decrepit and gorgeous, we dare you to doubt our will for life.

We cannot have Tracy back. But we can and shall have back this landscape. We can and shall reject the dangerous notion that Robert’s life is natural, and that Tracy’s somehow was not. We can and shall reclaim, for the young prairie woman of 32 who would have been Tracy Latimer, a place among the Maples.

My letter of complaint to Global will be posted shortly on the Supplementals page. Meanwhile, I hope you will check out some of the resources linked to the Sources page, and consider adding your own take.

]]>https://fragileandwild.com/2012/07/10/this-land-is-my-land-robert-latimer-and-the-plundered-landscape/feed/11Latimer LandscapecfrazeeVenom without malice: On first meeting a rattlesnakehttps://fragileandwild.com/2012/05/05/venom-without-malice-on-first-meeting-a-rattlesnake/
https://fragileandwild.com/2012/05/05/venom-without-malice-on-first-meeting-a-rattlesnake/#commentsSat, 05 May 2012 07:33:51 +0000http://fragileandwild.com/?p=212]]>A reptilian head appears from behind a large rock. Curious to decipher a species quite unlike the now-familiar collared lizard or whiptail, I sharpen my focus. And sharply, the threshold question is settled. This is a snake.

I am startled, but quickly my alarm gives way to the titillations of a comfortable danger. At a safe distance of 15 feet, I am free to stare, to marvel, to take in every detail of this creature’s form and extraordinary movement.

There is much to take in. Most striking at first is the speed at which she moves. A kind of fleetness that isn’t quite speed, but approaching something much more like speed than the lethargy of the captive snake. It is perhaps the difference between moving and being on the move – a particular affect of confidence and purpose. Perhaps I can say, without tilting too anthropomorphic, that she moves with muscular certainty.

Fleet without foot. Stance absent posture. Carriage while prone. I am utterly captivated, seeing as if for the first time a snake’s particular perfection of something that we share: a severely constrained physicality.

It takes nearly a full minute for her to reveal herself fully. Her camouflage is masterful, until the end. Three and one half feet of tawny russet pattern that perfectly mirror the dappled desert scrub. But then suddenly, a bit of inky unpleasantness – a jolt of black and white.

She finds a rocky fissure and disappears, those black rings on her white tail leaving me with no doubt about her identity. Western Diamondback Rattlesnake.

But now there are implications.

A venomous snake that remains on land taken over for human settlement tests a conservationist’s mettle like few other dilemmas. While it is true that snakes never hunt humans, and that a rattlesnake will only strike as a defensive last resort, a single careless footstep or innocent stumble can have life-altering consequences when rattlesnake and human territories overlap. As Charles Bowden observed, “… love of nature often leaves skid marks on the ground when it comes to snakes”.

I meet the snake again two days later. She is lying in full view, her body at rest in two relaxed folds, basking on the sunny concrete just inches outside my patio door. In this encounter there is no suspense, no holding my breath as I attempt to calculate her size, her species, her mission. There is just a large adult rattlesnake on one side of glass, and a small adult human on the other. The snake is out of her element, the human well within hers. Both are perfectly still.

We are strangers in the most complete sense. There is no bond of species or affection uniting us. And yet for a moment, to my own utter astonishment, I am caught up in a wave of tenderness toward this animal.

A complicated truth settles itself at my feet.

I might feel safer in a world that has rid itself of venomous snakes, a world in which the boundaries between wild and occupied are mercilessly enforced. Perhaps this brief encounter renders me incrementally more sympathetic to the impulse for homeland security. I am sharing this parcel of land with people I love. To spare the snake, requires me to embrace calamitous possibilities that I find intolerable, brings the unimaginable closer. Life in the desert is ruled by wit and violence. A rattlesnake on a residential property simply forces our hand.

Yet this magnificent creature, this Western Diamondback Rattlesnake, lives masterfully in a body that others revile. I cannot imagine a more compelling reason to accord her my full and unqualified respect.

We have our own reasons, each of us, for how we feel about snakes. It’s just that those reasons are mostly rote. I have had the privilege of meeting a rattlesnake on shared home turf. There can be no doubt that the terms of that sharing are volatile, and that the future of such an arrangement is at best, uncertain. But having met the rattlesnake in a manner in which we were equally free and vulnerable, neither holding dominion over the other, I am changed.

I have not seen the rattlesnake again since she slipped out of view, just moments before the arrival of a crew of affable firefighters ready to manage her relocation.But she remains present in my consciousness. And her place in the universe of my reverence for life remains intact.

Slowly, in the Arizona desert, I am learning to separate fear from loathing.

]]>https://fragileandwild.com/2012/05/05/venom-without-malice-on-first-meeting-a-rattlesnake/feed/2Rattlesnakecfrazee“All stories are about wolves”: Thoughts on the Northern Gateway Pipelinehttps://fragileandwild.com/2012/04/12/all-stories-are-about-wolves-thoughts-on-the-northern-gateway-pipeline/
https://fragileandwild.com/2012/04/12/all-stories-are-about-wolves-thoughts-on-the-northern-gateway-pipeline/#commentsThu, 12 Apr 2012 19:15:28 +0000http://fragileandwild.wordpress.com/?p=43]]>It’s the scale of it all that first assaults the mind.

Four and a half minutes into his January 9 TEDx talk – “The true cost of oil” – Garth Lenz projects an image of a 400 ton dump truck loaded with bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. A man of average height, Lenz reports that if he were standing in the frame, the top of his head might just reach the bottom edge of the truck’s hubcap.

At 3000 ft.², this truck is more than three times the size of my home.

In the next image, trucks of this same dimension are reduced to the size of a pixel, rendered invisible against a vast landscape of gored earth and deep-cut sludge.

As scale is the first assault, urgency is the second.

Urgency, because those monster dump trucks are hauling away the rubble of a once-teeming ecosystem at a mind-numbing rate. Three million barrels of oil are extracted from Canada’s tar sands every day. By my calculation, that’s just over 4000 barrels in the time it will take you to read this post. For every single one of those barrels produced from surface mines like the one shown in this image, two tons of Boreal forest is decimated, all living matter to a depth of 75 meters stripped bare.

By some unfathomable logic, the value of the Boreal is measured out in barrels of oil. It is like calculating the value of human life by the weight of vital organs. There’s a good price to be fetched for tarry bitumen, once relieved of its “overburden” of trees and water, peat and soil. Never mind that those trees and peat filter more greenhouse gases than any other ecosystem on earth – twice as much per acre as the tropical rainforest. Never mind that the Boreal hosts more than 80 per cent of the world’s liquid freshwater.

If there is a good enough price to be fetched for kindling, do we take a bandsaw to Picasso and Monet?

The proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline promises to make the extraction of tar sands oil considerably more profitable. That is its most compelling justification. It is also the reason that this pipeline must not proceed.

Think about it. There’s escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf.

The story of a pipeline that will transport half a million barrels of petroleum product daily from Alberta’s tar sands to offshore global markets is, ultimately, just another story about wolves. At the heart of the story is the question of allegiance.

It is time for every one of us to declare our place in this story. It is time to choose our wolf pack. The Review Panel is listening. My letter of comment is here. My sources are here. I hope you will join the chorus.

]]>https://fragileandwild.com/2012/04/12/all-stories-are-about-wolves-thoughts-on-the-northern-gateway-pipeline/feed/3Photo copyright Garth LenzcfrazeePutting it out there: Blogging as declaratory practicehttps://fragileandwild.com/2012/03/26/putting-it-out-there-blogging-as-declaratory-practice/
https://fragileandwild.com/2012/03/26/putting-it-out-there-blogging-as-declaratory-practice/#commentsMon, 26 Mar 2012 13:48:14 +0000http://fragileandwild.wordpress.com/?p=4]]>Writing augments life. That has been my experience. All that I see and feel, all that I think and know – it’s all better when I write. Writing slows me, clears me, heartens me.

Hence this blog.

Introverted, distractible and inclined to procrastinate, I am admittedly a dark horse in the internet stable of bloggers. Rarely, if ever, will I be first out of the gate with my entry into the day’s debate. Much as I might desire to deliver a torrent of comprehensive and persuasive dispatches, I am far more disposed to grazing than to galloping. This is not a winners’ circle blog.

Instead, it will be a blog of modest ambition.

Modest, because the passion of its convictions will be tempered by the realities of who I am, the life I live and the body from which I live it.

But ambitious nonetheless, because it begins with a commitment to submit the ideas and values I hold most dear to the scrutiny of text. Ambitious, because it is no small feat to glean what matters, and to be counted for one’s choice.

So, what can you expect?

I’ll be most inclined to write when I’m riled, and perhaps as well when I’m beguiled. This means that sometimes I will argue and coax, for that is the voice of conviction. But other times, I will ramble and mull, for that is the channel of wonder.

My posts will be short. I’ll do my best to frame without distortion, to make plain what is not simple.